Kelly’s Unnecessary Blog

I’ll give myself twenty minutes for this. It was sort of just something that came up as an aside this evening, but then I mentioned it out loud and it got requested that I dish on way-back boyfriends.

I was already thinking about P because I was talking about cribbage (see my previous post), which he and I used to play a lot. At the time, in 1984, I thought P was the love of my life. If we had been even five years older I think it would have had a good chance of working out, but we were just too young to handle what we had. I also have a number of music-related memories associated with him, not least of which is my love of Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark. I remember him saying once that all he wanted was to be Richard Butler from the Psychadelic Furs. Tonight I checked his business website (he’s a photographer) and found a new photo (he’s looking as good as ever). I also came across other photos that I had seen before of him and his band (which must just be part-time for fun). But this time when I looked up the band name, I found a video on You Tube. One of us has sort of achieved our life goal—the band was doing a cover of “Pretty in Pink.” P can still pull off those leather pants!

The other way-back boyfriend I ended up thinking about this evening was my first one waaaaaaay back in high school. I think I’ve mentioned before that it was not my own relationship with this fellow but my mother’s that had enormous influence on my subsequent dealings with men. My mother made it clear (in the immediate aftermath, anyway) that there was no one like B, and that scarred me for a long time because I never felt like anyone else would measure up. She remained friends with him, tried to get us back together by making me help him with Spanish, and sort of co-opted that circle of friends, even, years later, babysitting for him and his wife S who, in a bit of irony, was the childhood best friend of M, the girl who lived next door to my grandparents with whom I had become fast friends during our summer visits during my childhood. 

M and I weren’t able to retain the same level of intensity with our friendship after my parents and I actually moved from Ohio to that town in Wisconsin where she and my grandparents lived, and where I attended high school. I had known S since those childhood visiting days, and it was always kind of does-not-compute to me that B and S got together because I was never aware that they had known each other that well. But they are still together so obviously something was right.

Tonight’s pondering of B came up because S commented on a mutual other friend’s status during Super Bowl madness. B seems to have disappeared from online life but when he was still around I saw one small photo, and he looked like he was still in pretty good shape, too.

So there you have a little something extra. Fortunately, the only person who was actually acquainted with either of these two, and wouldn’t have minded being a way-back boyfriend in his own right, currently resides in Africa and can’t rat me out too badly. Or will you?

Time’s up.